Warren needs to apologize to Native Americans
In a victory that has all the trappings of a political coronation, Elizabeth Warren emerged from Massachusetts’ Democratic Party convention this weekend with enough support to avoid a primary battle for the right to seek the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Scott Brown.
However, her win could end up being a cause of concern, not celebration, in Boston and Washington, D.C.
With the last-minute backing of Deval Patrick, the state’s popular Democratic governor, Warren got the backing of 97.5% of the 3,500 delegates and thus prevented Marisa DeFranco, her only opponent, from having enough support to force a runoff election. But while her victory cleared the last hurdle she faced before competing for the Senate seat once held by liberal icon Edward Kennedy, it left a nagging issue unresolved.
For several years, Warren falsely identified herself as a Native American — a designation that raises serious questions about how such a misrepresentation might have advantaged her in obtaining a professorship at the Harvard Law School at a time when it was being attacked for its lack of diversity.
But when Brown attacked her claim, Democrats rallied their defense and Warren responded with a lot of feisty talk.
‘Not backing down’
“If that’s all you’ve got, Scott Brown, I’m ready. And let me be clear. I am not backing down. I didn’t get in this race to fold up the first time I got punched,” Warren said of her GOP opponent’s non-stop efforts to keep this issue before voters.
Brown is a go-along-to-get-along Eastern Republican who kowtows to the GOP’S right wing. His voting record ought to offend most Massachusetts voters, who are liberal. But his right-wing ideological rigidity could prove to be less of an issue for a decisive bloc of voters in the Bay State than Warren’s identity crisis. Her assertion that family tales and the high cheekbones of some relatives led her to believe she had Native American blood coursing through her veins is laughable. That many Democrats, obsessed with unseating Brown, treat what she did as meaningless is lamentable. Dogfight of an election
Democrats are in a real dogfight. President Obama, the top of their ticket in November, is in a neck-andneck race with Mitt Romney, the GOP’s White House candidate. And with 23 Democratic and just 10 Republican members of the U.S. Senate up for re-election this year, the GOP has a good chance of winning control of both houses of Congress because the party is expected to retain its solid majority in the House of Representatives.
The Massachusetts Senate race, considered a tossup, could be pivotal. The lingering specter of a white, liberal Democrat who claimed to be a minority in a job where that status could have enhanced her chances for promotion and tenure might decide the outcome of the battle for control of Congress.
That’s why Warren must act quickly to put this issue behind her. She needs to apologize to Native Americans, whose struggles for opportunities she minimized by claiming from her position of prestige to be one of them. She should apologize to the supporters of affirmative action for undermining their efforts to bring real diversity to the faculty of Harvard’s law school. And in a “come to Jesus” speech to the people of Massachusetts, Warren needs to offer them the kind of contrition that has eluded her when discussing this issue.
Only then, I think, will she be able to turn the focus from her misspeak to Brown’s misdeeds in supporting so much of the GOP’s right-wing agenda.